Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly debuted a new look at the young cast of Netflix’s Stranger Things (including Eleven and her new hairdo) on their latest cover, and now they’ve published an interview with one half of the series’ creative team, Matt Duffer. Though we already had a rough idea of what to expect in terms of the timeline and whatnot, Duffer reveals some intriguing new plot details concerning Will Byers, Sheriff Hopper and a couple of the new characters that’ll be introduced.
For one, it seems we’ll be reconnecting with Will, Lucas, Mike and Dustin almost a full year after the events of the first season, as the boys are preparing for Halloween (see the image above). Outwardly, Will appears to have recovered from his time spent in the Upside Down, but Duffer reveals that he’s experiencing terrifying visions from the other dimension:
He seems to be seeing images from the Upside Down — the question is whether they’re real or not. So it seems like he’s having some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The troubled Sheriff Hopper, meanwhile, will have his own issues to deal with as he attempts to keep a lid on the extraordinary events that occurred one year prior (that includes hiding the truth about Barb’s death… sorry #JusticeForBarb folks), while Will’s mother Joyce begins dating an old high school classmate, Bob (The Goonies’ Sean Astin).
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit though relates to the new brother-sister duo that will be relocating to Hawkins: Billy (Dacre Montgomery) and Max (Sadie Sink). While the latter gets tied up in a love triangle with Lucas and Dustin, it sounds like Billy is being set up as a nasty new human villain:
Stephen King always has really great human villains. The evil in the real world is often as bad or worse than the supernatural evil, so we wanted to introduce a character like that.
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of how Eleven will be reintroduced after her seemingly fatal encounter with the Demogorgon, but that’s most likely a reveal they’ll save for the show itself. Still, this gives us quite a bit to digest and speculate upon while we patiently await the return of Stranger Things season 2 this October.